The way we communicate in the digital space is changing. We no longer rely solely on text to get our thoughts out there. Mainly because we don’t have the time or the screen space on those little portable lifelines of ours. We have a whole new quiver of language to use like emojis, memes, giphys, images, videos and so on.
We chatted about this “evolution in communication” here at Boxcar Creative and our Director of Creative Strategy put it like this:
“One of the difficulties of, say, a conversation via text or chat was the lack of inflection, or tone, or intent. The things that inject meaning into what we’re saying. For example, Person A texts, “I just got a new job!” to Person B. Person B, in return, says, “That’s great!” How does Person A know that Person B is being sincere and not sarcastic or patronizing? They don’t. It’s a huge assumption. A lot of these attempts to use non-textual language is trying to add the emotional meaning to the words we use.” – Jim Kuenzer
How has this changed the way we communicate digitally? Let’s look at some examples we found to help demonstrate the shift in communication we are experiencing.
Here’s how Coke is using emojis. How will this affect mobile search? Will emojis soon replace text? Emoticoke
There are new ways to share our emotions. Hug App
What would Mad Men say about this shift. Mad Men Memes
Get in the game by creating your own emoji avatar and lots of other cool things to express yourself with Bitmoji.
What do you think? Have you used emojis in your texts or communicated through memes? Show us some examples.
For years, football, baseball, soccer and NASCAR have been battle grounds for brands. Companies pay enormous amounts of money to get their logo in front of thousands if not millions of people. Sporting events will always be solid marketing tools, but a new force is rising with a fury and that force is e-sports.
Countries like Korea and China have had a strong e-sports base for over 10 years. But in recent years, North American and European countries have taken to e-sports and now have a growing audience. This international attention culminated in the League of Legends 2014 Championship match, watched by over 27 million people. More people watched two teams play a video game then watched the 5 games of the 2014 NBA Finals or the 7 games of the World Series. The audience is strongest in the male 13 to 34 age group; though many people in older age groups have trouble imagining people watching professional gamers play a game, whether it’s the lack of history behind e-sports or lack of understanding. However, people spend hundreds of hours watching professional players play a game just like a fan would watch football or baseball. The difference is that the e-sports world still has room for brands and to grow its market even larger. There are many ways to reach e-sports fans and on such a global scale that can hardly be matched by any other sport. This is only on the internet as well. ESPN recently started to show e-sports matches and TBS is going to have its very own e-sports league in 2016. If successful, e-sports could become a permanent staple in television.
E-sports have a global reach with the players and teams, each having their own loyal fan base. Here is a short list of the few, yet powerful, ways that a brand can show its value to the e-sports audience:
Just like people who dream of playing in the NFL or MLB, people now dream about becoming a professional gamer. Take something they love and enjoy and becoming paid to do it. Also almost anyone can play a video game. It’s a common connection that many people have. Though the world of e-sports is growing, now it’s more of a marketing strategy than a huge revenue driver. Only the future can tell if the world of e-sports will become the next NFL or MLB.
With social media today, within a matter of minutes, hundreds upon thousands of people can view another person’s or company’s opinion and each reply with their own. The greatest achievements or the largest blunders can be shown in seconds and never erased, no matter how hard a person tries. This is the power – and risk – of social media.
“Going viral” is one of the most powerful tools in the age of digital marketing. However, companies can take an enormous risk when they try to engage their consumers. Take DiGiorno Pizza and their blunder with the hashtag #WhyIStayed. The short version: DiGiorno tweeted “#WhyIStayed You had Pizza.” At the time, women had taken to twitter to discuss why they had stayed in abusive relationships. DiGiorno deleted the tweet, issued an apology saying they did not know what the hashtag meant and responded to each person, who tweeted an offended reply, a personal and sincere apology. That one mistake, whether it was really unintentional or a terrible attempt to promote their brand, could have been fatal for the company, but they handled it well and came back looking better than most companies in similar situations. That was a simple blunder, but the way Applebee’s handled their social media tragedy would make anyone cringe in digital agony.
Considered by many as a prime example of the worst way to handle a social/PR fiasco, Applebee’s fired a waitress for posting a picture of a customer’s negative receipt. Many people took to the company’s Facebook and Twitter pages, demanding the company rehire the waitress. In response, Applebee’s ignored and deleted user’s comments or blocked users. Once hiding failed they resorted to a copy and paste response which made the digital hulk even angrier. Finally, when all of the other worst possible options failed, Applebee’s social media team argued with the commenters. Here is an article describing the whole thing in all of its terrible glory (with pictures): http://tinyurl.com/pv2lmdf
This nightmare of a situation could have been avoided had Applebees’s been consistent in its behavior. They had previously posted a receipt online and nobody got fired. If you haven’t fired someone in the past for the same behavior then it’s not right to do so later on. They also could have engaged many of the angry social users and got on a positive and personal level with them, like DiGiorno did. This would not have stopped the bombardment, but it would have been the start to calm the digital hurricane and shown an earnest attempt to make good on their actions. Next, they could have posted statuses at critical times during the day to show that they care about the situation and understand that it is not going away. Most importantly, don’t delete comments or block users. Engage them and show that their voice is heard, unless they are offensive and posting things that have nothing to do with the topic at hand.
This titan known as social can bury a company with one mistake or, if done well, can elevate a company to a brand status known only to select elite. What is your take on the importance of social? What, in your opinion, are the best practices for online presence? Have any social media success stories? Or horror stories? We would love to hear about them.
Summary:
If you’ve never heard of SEO, the acronym stands for “search engine optimization.” What does it mean? Allow me to introduce Rand Fishkin, a SEO guru. Here’s his explanation of this mystical creature.
“SEO is really any input that engines use to rank pages. Any input that engines use to rank pages goes into the SEO bucket, and anything that people or technology does to influence those ranking elements is what the practice of SEO is about.”
To many, SEO is a mysterious practice, often shrouded in misconception and misunderstanding. It seems to be an attempt at cracking the code of the search engines and making them do what you want. Honestly, though, who has time for that? On top of which, there seems to be no shortage of shady SEO practitioners out there, making promises of first page rankings for anyone with deep enough pockets.
However, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. And while an astute SEO can fix many a site’s problems, SEO simply can not promise an easy, quick fix to get a site to shoot up to the top of the first page of a search engine overnight.
Although SEO tactics vary according to a site’s objectives, the big picture goal of most sites is for their SEO efforts to create greater value for a search engine. These objectives depend on your specific business. Some sites want to rank high on Google and Bing, some want to sell more, and some want more traffic. What is best for your site isn’t necessarily what’s best for the other guy’s. So, just keep that in mind when thinking about what you want to gain from your SEO efforts.
In an effort to help you better understand SEO, perhaps I should start by telling you what not to do rather than what to do.
Back in the old days of SEO, much of the practice involved keyword placement. Which is primarily, but not exclusively, placing researched and targeted keywords in a site’s copy, title tag, and meta-desription. This led to people trying to game the system. Writers were stuffing their content full of keywords. That is, loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. One example of this might be, “We sell used cars and pre-owned used cars on our pre-owned and used car lot.” Not only is this sentence stuffed with the keywords “used cars” and “pre-owned cars” it’s pure nonsense and shouldn’t be read by anyone. So the search engines stopped placing so much importance on keyword placement and started looking for relative, useful content to judge the authority of a website.
So, keyword stuffing is out. Search engines don’t concentrate their importance on keywords like they used to. Nowadays you should focus your keyword research on your site’s title tags, meta descriptions and use them as a starting point for creating original, trustworthy, useful content for your users.
Also, make sure you’re gaining links naturally. Google frowns on those sites that employ link schemes, like buying links, large-scale guest posting, link exchanges, and other tactics designed to exploit links building to boost page rank. In fact, link building schemes have become so prevalent that SEO’s are removing links from sites in order to avoid the wrath of Google.
What else is important these days? The answer is, well, everything is important. Go back to Rand’s quote from above.
I often refer to the practice of SEO as a holistic approach that involves psychology, analytics, branding, advertising, social media, blogs, email, and whatever else is out there to drive traffic to online entities.
Remember, Google wants to return its users’ queries with the best, most relevant, most trustworthy, and fastest answers. So try to deliver the most value to your end user and you’ll be on the right path.
I hope this post has cleared up the mysterious world of SEO at least a little. Still have questions? Drop me line and I’ll do what I can to help you out.
More about SEO to come.